Story Time: The Forgotten Realms Creation Myth

Out of timeless nothingness, there rose dark and indistinct mists, foreshadowing of what was to come, an idea of existence, guided by a will we dare name Ao, the Hidden One.

With Time, the mists began to change. Out of the idea, form came to be. Into a primeval expanse, secluded from the rest of the multiverse, twin spirits were born: The sisters who-were-one, one of them of cool brightness, one of them of soothing darkness. And they existed in perfect and static harmony for eons.

Then, there was a pull. And a push. The sisters’ harmony began to flow. There was was rise, and there was fall. There was up, and there was down. There was ground, and there was above… And in between the flow, new form was created.

The sisters noticed the change. The bright one, Selûne, was curious about the things that they had created, while the dark one, Shar, was bothered by the sudden flow of existence.

But still, form was hollow, with no idea of itself. Selûne touched a form with her brightness, while Shar withdrew from it. Conscience was sparked in the form, and spread throughout its entire being.

Thus, the World was born, but it was still incomplete and only ideas pressed into form. It cried out, and Selûne nurtured it with light, while Shar watched it warily from a distance.

The World begged for warmth so that she could nurture life and living creatures upon the planets that were her body and limbs, and the two sisters became divided, as for the first time they were of two minds. Silvery Selûne contested with her dark sister over whether or not to bring further life to the worlds.

A battle ensued, and from the spirits’ argument, new concepts were born that spread into the world, and formed into being. These beings later formed into the gods of life, love, death, magic, war, and sacrifice were created, and took their part in the deific struggle.

During the battle, Selûne seized the advantage and reached across time and space to the inner core of creation, a roiling chaos of unformed elemental stuff. She grabbed a part of the chaos, which burned and eroded her divine essence. She took a fiery fragment of flame from the chaos, and set it into space as a sun, that bathed the World in warmth and comfort, and life awakened in the World.

Incensed, Shar redoubled her attack on her injured twin and began to snuff out all light and heat in order to swallow it in darkness, returning the world to a state of nonlife. Again Selûne gave of herself and tore the divine essence of magic from her body, flinging it desperately at her sister in defense of life in the sphere, creating the goddes of magic, Mystryl, in the process.

Though Mystryl was composed of both light and dark magic, she favored her first mother Selune initially, allowing the silver goddess to win an uneasy truce with her more powerful, dark twin. Consumed by bitterness at her defeat, Shar vowed eternal revenge, and their struggle continues to this day.

Shar remained powerful, but bitterly alone, hiding in the World’s Shadow, while Selune waxed and waned in power, often drawing strength from her allied daughters and sons and like-minded immigrant deities residing in her silvery Astral Sea.

The Lords of Chaos

While the sisters fought their first eon-spanning battles, the world was unprotected, and on waves of elemental chaos, powerful beings of manifest entropy rode into the World and began to shape it into their desires. The name of their kind has been lost to the ages; the few sages who today know of their existence refer to them simply as the primordials.

The Goddesses came to a halt in their struggle, when the World was inexplicably plunged into darkness, its sun snatched from the sky by a sinister primordial known as the Night Serpent. The twin sisters and their fellow gods recognized the primordial threat and bargained an alliance. Shar wants to rid the World of all elements, returning it to swirling mists of nothingness, while Selûne and her allies wanted to protect the World’s beings from destruction and slavery.

A cataclysmic war raged over the World. The Elder Gods, led by a deity called the World Serpent, managed to win the war only with the aid of a rogue primordial called Ubtao the Deceiver. The primordials were killed or imprisoned on the far reaches of the cosmos or in hidden places in the World. In order to never let the world again experience such destruction, the goddess known as the Earthmother gave some of her essence to awaken the World’s primal spirits to keep gods and primordials alike from stepping into the World.

The primordials fester in their prisons or hide in the Elemental Chaos to this day, waiting for a chance to plunge the world back into entropy.